MARIE: Rapid Prototyping for Robotics

Carle
Côté emailed to tell us about the first public release of MARIE:
We are proud to announce the first public release of MARIE, Version 0.1 (Tinker).
The Mobile and Autonomous Robotics Integration Environment (MARIE) is a
robotic development and integration environment focused on existing
softwares reusability and exploitation of already available APIs and
middlewares frequently used in robotics. The main purpose of MARIE is to
create a rapid-prototyping approach to software development in robotics.

- What is MARIE?

MARIE is a new design tool for mobile and autonomous robot application,
designed to facilitate the integration of multiple heterogeneous
software elements. It is a flexible tool based on a distributed model,
thus allowing the realization of an application using one machine or
various networked machines, architectures and platforms.

- How do we do this?

By creating several modules which have a specific role in the overall
application. The first part consists of application adapters which
handle all the details of a specific external application, including the
starting and stopping of the application and the data conversion. The
application adapters communicate together using a common data
language based on XML (see Data types documentation). These communications
are handled by the communication adapters which can handle several
communication paradigms. All these modules are supervised by the
application manager which delegates the communication part to one
or several communication managers.